THE GHOST IN THE WELL

When Churchill sought solace in puffing rings of smoke from his cigar, sipping whiskey from his tumbler, he must have looked awkwardly at the footprints of war scattered all over the place. In a twist of events, at the end of the six-year conflict, new alliances were formed granting Stalin complete control over the eastern bloc, causing a shift that moved my grandmother’s homeland from east to west. The betrayal by the allies was swift and painful. If Churchill peered closely through the veil of smoke, he would have noticed what giving a ring of power to a foe did to my grandmother’s fate in the unfolding history of events.

A great resettlement of a large population was taking place after the war, compared to wrecking the river systems, and the entire ecosystem because that is how it felt for people leaving their homes and moving westwards, displacing the original inhabitants. In the new crafted borders, the German population had to travel further west to seek alternative homes. As the front pushed through and drove out the Nazi troops, not all Germans left as instructed. Many families waited at home for the return of the German soldiers, in shock that they had lost the war. They remained despite being ordered to leave the country that wasn’t theirs anymore.

The destitute Germans heading west faced many hardships during their long marches—some perished along the way while others stayed behind, hiding in barns, confused and terrified. Some German families lived on the outskirts of the woods, and unable to withstand the freezing temperatures, they too perished while the new settlers took over their homes and livestock. Seeking revenge for the war atrocities, the new homeowners often sought retribution if they found any German still lingering in a village, clinging to hopes the Führer was alive and well.

The planned uprooting affected my grandmother, who was forced to move west with her daughter and a son to a place called Shönlanke. In no time, the town had been given a new name, but the school she arrived at still bore the German eagle that nobody bothered to remove. As my grandmother joined a massive queue at that school grounds fronting the local government department assigning houses of varying sizes and plots, she was pleased with the one given to her. The size of the house depended on whether one could prove ownership before the war. Luckily, my grandmother was able to produce the necessary paperwork showing that her family were the landowners before the Bolsheviks confiscated it.

At first glance, her new property made a good impression with spacious rooms, and a large fruit orchard featuring a well with a green pump and a chain on which hung a bucket to draw water.

However, after a few sleepless nights, my grandmother realised some supernatural occurrences disturbed her sleep, taking place outside the house. Being superstitious, she decided the house was haunted. She complained to the authorities, but no one took her claims seriously or fulfilled her request to clear the well of the active “ghost” that was preventing her from using the well to bring water to her garden.

Whenever we visited my grandmother, I used to play around that well as a child, dropping nickels for luck, searching for my reflection in the deep water, despite her warnings to stay away from it. She would explain that a tortured soul lived there, chewing on her pump, as she proceeded to tell me a chilling tale.

The days after she took over the house, her request to the authorities to sanitize the pump, fell on deaf ears. Resigned to dealing with the blocked well herself, my grandmother asked her neighbour for help, and they were horrified to fish out a dead man, wearing a German uniform with a ghastly shotgun wound to his face.

After stripping him of his insignia and helmet, they decided against reporting their discovery for fear of being questioned about the circumstances leading to the drowned man’s death. Accusations of murdering the enemy were real in those uncertain times, so instead, they transported the remains in a wagon to the local cemetery. The understanding priest agreed to bury the body without identification, ordering a hasty burial attended by my grandmother and her neighbour to mourn the deceased. Or perhaps they didn’t lament over his passing at all, as death wasn’t a special event anymore and people became immune to severe injuries from bullets.

My resourceful grandmother made use of the helmet by anchoring it near the chicken coup as a feeder for her hens. She kept the officer’s insignia in a jar with shells as some morbid trophy. Perhaps, looking at her strange keepsake, she wielded powers over the ghost in the well, which she claimed was scaring her hens at night, somehow connected to these items. Most likely, it was just the wind rattling the chain with the bucket, making ripples in the water, sifting through her memories of this particularly unpleasant ghost. Years had gone by, and to my understanding, no one came forth to claim the dead soldier who as it seems died in vain. Like many others, they just obeyed orders, moving like pawns around the chessboard of war.  

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